Afterward
by Red River
Summary: AU. Eight years after rejoining the CIA, Michael comes back to Miami to see what his friends have made of the life he left behind, and realizes for the first time just how much he's lost. Maybe it's not too late to make amends. Oneshot, Michael's perspective; mainly a family story, Jesse/Fiona on the side.


A/N: This story is AU from the end of season six of Burn Notice. Michael, having gotten his job back and left Miami, comes back eight years later to see what his friends have made of the lives he left behind, and realizes just how much he's lost. I couldn't stand the last season, and by the end I couldn't stand Michael either, so I wanted to imagine a different end, one in which Michael realized that maybe his job wasn't what he'd really needed all that time. Also, this story does portray Jesse and Fiona in a relationship - I know that's not a popular pairing, but I think he would be so good to her. Please enjoy.

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Afterward

The house hasn't changed much in eight years. It's always seemed strange to him, how little buildings and neighborhoods and cities change on the outside, how little they show the wear of the years slipping like shadows through their doors. He knows once he steps inside, he'll begin to see the differences, and they'll chafe at first, this division between sight and memory, something in him stubbornly resisting the truth that any time has passed at all. The block smells like magnolia, like it always does, and there's something tender in the familiar scent, his lungs aching with the perfume they haven't held in almost a decade. It's enough to keep him in the car for another few minutes before he finds his way to the bell.

His mom isn't as surprised as he expects. Or maybe it's not that—her eyes are wide enough, and if the bowl of half-mixed cookie dough she shatters on the front mat isn't proof of her astonishment, then it's a hell of an act to put on for his benefit. She hugs him tight enough she almost cracks a rib. It takes until she releases him and hurries back into the kitchen, grousing at smoke pouring out of the oven vent, for him to realize what it is, what strikes him as odd. She's happy, but she's not blown away. Her world hasn't tilted with his footsteps in the hall. He's still her ghost—probably always will be, the last one still walking around—but he's not the center of her universe anymore. It's easy to see what's taken his place.

"Charlie, do you remember Uncle Michael? He used to push you on the swings, back when you were too little to play by yourself."

The bright-eyed boy at the kitchen table barely looks up, intent on his watercolors. The walls are heavy with bleeding hues, picture after picture in cheap matte frames. Either he's a fantastic artist or it's just been that long since Michael looked hard at anything besides blowing sand, plated ammunition, concrete bunker walls. He'd planned to tell her about it, to do her the favor he never did the first time, fill in the blanks, but he can tell without offering that she doesn't want it anymore, and he can't bring that kind of death here. This house is alive in a way it never was when he was small enough to prop his elbows on the table and lose himself in the world of ink and water.

The buffet is bursting the way it used to long ago on holidays, pasta salad and cold cuts and the crab cakes she's blackened a little past the point of intentional crisp, and for a second he wonders if somehow she was expecting him, if somewhere in the middle of his twenty-two-hour red-eye, already dreaming about this though he'd been a good boy, kept his mouth shut, if somehow she felt him coming, the prodigal son, and set all this out to greet him—but it doesn't take him long to realize his mistake. He's caught her in the middle of something, living the life he left her to when he took the CIA up on their offer eight years ago and stepped back into the abyss. It's what he always told himself he hoped she was doing, but now he's not sure. Something in him feels unsettled, knocked loose. Maybe he should have called after all. Maybe he needed her to be anticipating this too.

"You look good, Mom."

She waves him off, or maybe she's just fanning the crab cakes. But it's true—she's lost a little weight, she's still off her smokes, and more than anything she seems…carefree. He's realizing suddenly how little she looked like that even when he was living in Miami, even when Nate was still alive. He sits down across from Charlie in the Sunday afternoon sunlight and sort of breathes that in, tries to figure out what Nate's little boy is painting. But it's been too long, he's out of practice with the way kids see the world, and anyway he knows almost nothing about Charlie anymore. Last he knew, his favorite animals were still dinosaurs.

The doorbell makes his shoulders tense, just an old habit. But he's the only one—his mom lifts her head with a smile, and Charlie leaps out of his seat, runs for the door. He gets the sense no one's had to fear the doorbell around here for a very long time.

The look he exchanges with Sam is a long one. He gets the sense that Sam is sizing him up, reading every new line and scar like a map of where he's been the last eight years, what blood he's dipped his hands into—like he's deciding whether his sleepless, unshaven stranger in the living room is friend or enemy. But in the end, this is Sam, and a friend is all he ever chooses to be—he steps forward and gives Michael a hug and a clap on the shoulder and a look that says they'll talk later, if he sticks around that long.

Michael wants to tell him that he looks good, too—still mostly in fighting shape, shirt buttoned a little higher than he remembers, probably due to that gold band on his left ring finger; he couldn't get back Stateside for the wedding, didn't really try, couldn't really believe Sam of all people was settling down, but it looks good on him, looks like Elsa's found that part of him that was always eager to be devoted to something. Michael wants to say something about it, make the joke, get him laughing…but he's missed his window, and Sam has other things to attend to right now, bantering with his mom over the kitchen island, complimenting Charlie on the newest masterpiece still drying on the table.

"Man, Charlie, at this rate, you're going to out-blue the whole Blue Period," Sam says, and winks over his shoulder at Michael, maybe more out of habit than anything, and Michael can tell just from looking at him that he makes a great Uncle Sam, that maybe in a kinder world he'd be resting that friendly hand on his own child's shoulder. But he looks happy, happy enough with his six-pack of beer and Tupperware of cubed Jell-O. Maybe Michael's the only one of them still chasing might-have-beens.

He doesn't have to look out the window to know who's honking from the drive.

"Hey, Charlie, let's go wrestle up the boys," Sam says, leading Charlie easily away from the kitchen where something is on fire again. "Mike, you coming?" he throws out at the last, on the threshold, and Michael can't find a reason to say no. There's no delaying this anyway.

The sunlight is lying heavy on the front garden, almost blinding off the roof of the big BMW minivan that shimmers like a mirage on the curb, a locus of cheerful voices that echo down the quiet block the way only children's voices do. Jesse is kneeling next to one of the passenger doors, unbuckling the seatbelts of twin little boys, maybe six years old with his bronzed skin, and from the walk Michael can hear him negotiating something in that calm, steady way that only Jesse ever could.

"Well, you know what, TJ, I told you specifically not to dunk this little Iron Man dude in your Hi-C, so you and I are going to have a serious talk the next time you want a Happy Meal…" Then he's up and turning, shaking the orange-spattered action figure, and he's caught sight of Michael, and if there's a certain stiffness to his spine, well, maybe it's just surprise. "Holy mother of meyhem," Jesse says, lets the action figure slip out of his hand and tumble into the grass, one soldier down just so they can shake hands. "There's a face I haven't seen in a while." Then almost without thought he turns, searching for someone on the other side of the car, and Michael and Sam turn with him, all of their eyes drawn inexorably, inevitably to the woman who stands at the hood with a little girl in one arm and a picnic basket in the other, and her gray eyes find Michael and ignite him like a pyre.

It isn't like this is a surprise. She and Jesse were already heading this way when Michael finally got his job back, let it take him to the four corners of the world like he always wanted and tried not to look over his shoulder. She'd slapped him that night he told her he was rejoining the Agency, but it wasn't for herself anymore—it was just a parting shot, the final snap of something vital and irreplaceable breaking between them. In the dark times, the black holes where he'd wrapped his arms around his knees and dreamed himself somewhere else, sometimes he almost thought he could still feel the sting of it reddening his cheek, the last time someone touched him and cared that much. He wondered, coming here, if she'd even see him. But that anger has blown out, he can tell—whatever unholy chaos he raised up in Fi has left her after all this time in better company, and her eyes are cool as they hold him, smoky mirrors taking him in without judgment or regret. Her daughter looks at him too—probably three years old, dirty blond hair that will turn brown like hers soon enough. He used to wonder sometimes what a little girl would look like with her eyes. But even at the time, he knows, he was never really imagining himself standing beside her.

"Hello, Michael," she says, her lips quirking up in a smile that's almost fond, and it breaks something—maybe the spell that had held them all, waiting for her reaction. Maybe something a little deeper in him that he doesn't care to examine.

"Right," Jesse says. "Introductions. Uh, we have Claire—" The name sizzles in Michael like a depth charge, a tribute he never thought Fiona would be able to pay, and he wants to ask if Jesse knows the significance of that name—but of course he does. Jesse rests his hands on his sons' heads, musses their hair just to make them groan. "TJ, and then of course Sam Jr.—mainly because the 209 was completely backed up and I thought Sam here was going to have to deliver right in the back of the armored car."

"Yeah, well that's what happens when you bring your past-term pregnant wife along as the getaway driver on a…" Sam catches himself, considers his young audience. "…an involuntary financial exchange with a few rather rude gentlemen from the former Soviet bloc."

It's clearly a story they've told many times, an argument so well trodden it's become just a part of the narrative. He's only just realizing how many stories he's missed—that he wasn't the only one having adventures and gaping wide-eyed at once-in-a-lifetime moments over the last eight years. In fact, he's not even sure how many of those moments he had, at least that he'd want to relive. He wants to ask for the rest of the story, but he's out of the rhythm, doesn't quite know how. He settles for smiling at the boys.

"Seems like you must have your hands full."

"Oh, hands full doesn't begin to cover it," Jesse promises him. Fiona's still just watching them from the beside the front tire, her thin fingers curling ringlets into Claire's fine hair. Michael tries to catch her eye again, but she's watching her twins as they bound over to Sam, tug on his arms like orangutans.

"Did Aunt Elsa make Jell-O for dessert?" one of them asks—which one, he'll probably never be able to tell.

Sam laughs from deep in his belly. "You better believe it. Let's get inside, see if we can sneak a little before Maddy tucks it away in that industrial-sized fridge of hers." That's all it takes to get the boys running, Charlie too, their little voices spiking higher like boys' will when they're not trying to be men yet, Sam jogging after them at a smoother pace, looking pretty boyish himself. Jesse and Fiona follow, and Michael does too, at a reserve, trying not to feel like their shadow, not to notice Jesse's hand on her lower back, not to catch Claire's disconcerting gray eyes staring at him over her mother's shoulder.

The afternoon draws away from them slow and languid, heavy with laughter. They descend on the buffet and he's not sure who makes a bigger mess, the boys or Sam. They tune the TV to a football game, but they only watch half a quarter of it before the kids are restless and then they get a game going in the backyard instead, Sam and the boys versus Jesse and Claire and Fiona, and if the toddler scores on her own team once or twice, no one seems to notice. Fiona scores a touchdown riding on Jesse's back, her arms locked around his shoulders, and Madeline claps so loud Michael feels it in the hollow under his breastbone. He feels like he's on the sidelines of the afternoon—never really excluded, but he can't figure out how to get into the middle of this either. He doesn't have Sam's rapport with the kids. He's not sure what to say to Jesse and Fi and his mom. They're all at a distance from each other now, like they were when he first came back to Miami—but then, they were all broken in at least one or two places, a few spots where he could line them up against his own jagged edges. Now he's the only one looking for a place to heal, and he's not sure this is the place anymore. He came here to tell them he might be sticking around—he's been offered a job at a private security company here in Miami, a management position behind a desk, and for the first time in his life he's feeling like it might be time to take it. But maybe that isn't such a good idea, if this is what coming home is going to feel like.

In the evening hours, when the sun is finally sinking over the ocean to the west and dusk hangs in the low branches like skulking ghosts, Michael finds himself sitting next to Sam on the back porch, listening to his mom and Jesse pack the dishwasher and watching Fiona blow bubbles for the kids, their little hands and arms churning as they leap around in the gloaming. Sam tilts his beer back and then turns his head, fixes Michael with a look.

"So, Mike. When you coming back around to stay, brother?"

It means a lot to Michael to hear Sam call him that after all these years, after the times he wondered if he was becoming unrecognizable, all the things he had to do for his country and his job stripping the polish off a young man Sam had maybe deemed a friend too early. But he's still Michael's friend, or would be. That's what the expression on his face says. Michael takes a slow breath.

"I'm not sure whether that's a good idea," he says, doesn't really want to get into it. He's already practically talked himself back into the field, away from this place, the skeletons of a life that he buried while it was still breathing. He can feel the self-pity in that decision, but it doesn't make it any less appealing. Sam takes another sip and leans his head back, closes his eyes.

"Sure it is. I mean, retirement's no peach, but Miami's as good a place as any. Better than most. Just ask our snowbirds." The silence hangs between them for a moment before Sam adds, "I've never known you to be a coward, Mike. Don't start now."

Michael wants to lash out at that—to ask what he has to come back for, to stay for, when they've all moved on, built lives without him. But he's old enough now that he's come to realize he was the one who started it—he was the one who built a life without them, a life that could never have included them. Her. If he wants to make a place for himself here, he's going to have to start by digging himself out of a hole eight years in the making.

Michael opens his mouth to say no, hesitates as he watches Charlie clapping his hands around a bubble, catches a glimpse of Nate in his face. Has to blink his eyes clear as he wonders if his mom sees that too, every day.

"Yeah," he finally says. "All right, Sam." And that's all.


End file.
